In response to my previous rant about trying a usb audio device on Ubuntu, Andy Bold left a helpful comment pointing me to polypaudio. However on Dapper I could not find this package and it appeared that it had been dropped from Dapper asthe project was dead (or at least that is why it was dropped from Debian)

However I’ve found that polypaudio has been brought back to life and from what I’ve read it looks like we should rip out esd and replace with polypaudio. Kudos to Cendio for funding some of the new developments which has seemed to kickstarted the project again.

Now to see if I can get it working (or hope that someone builds a Dapper package).

The motivator in all this, for me at least, is to be able to have my usb headset plugged in, allowing me to listen to tunes/podcasts in banshee and receive and make calls via ekiga / xten / gizmo / skype (for the time being I’m happy pausing the music myself until telepathy get’s sorted).